Journalists are not very smart part XXIII (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, March 16, 2016, 18:51 (3411 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Several times I've been able to "return the crates" while the enemies are just standing around talking. Or wander very close to a group looting a body. So you can get close without really triggering a response. I can stop and shoot mobs that are just kind of standing there and haven't noticed me, which is kind of immersion breaking. I mean if this was real life and a guy just rolled up and popped two punks Deathwish style I think the onlookers would freak a bit.

I haven't played, so I can't comment, but I've been soaking up coverage on The Division (and talking to friends that play), and it seems like that's one of the bigger issues. The gameplay doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense from a story perspective. It all kinda seems like it devolves into "Shoot those looters!" and then once they're dead, you just carry on doing the exact same thing they were doing. It seems like you're pretty objectively just as bad as the people you're killing, and that's without taking anything that happens in the Dark Zone into consideration.

Now, maybe that's not true at all, and I'll likely never know for sure, but that's the impression I get from everything I've heard.

There are in-game narrative reasons why looters are bad guys. Spoilers below:

Looters
CCTV of them chasing down a couple of unarmed civilians and beating them to death with baseball bats just for fun, laughing the whole time.

Cleaners
Literally burning anyone and everyone alive in a misguided effort to stop the spread of the plague. Audio recordings of one of them burning his neighbor alive... Ugh.

Rikers
These are escaped rapists and murderers, they do all the most fucked up things you can think of. In one mission, you come across a table with a captured cop who is just crying uncontrollably. Behind him is a pile of dead cops. And there's a sign, painted in blood, that says "Make us laugh or join your friends." Lots of other stuff with these guys, too.

LMB
These guys are sort of intentionally in a grey area. They're both thinking they're doing the right thing and clearly being led in the wrong direction, but they're true believers so they shoot at you first and ask questions later. Even in this spoiler I don't want to spoil everything.